A respiratory virus is the main cause of acute respiratory infection, which is regarded as the most common disease irrespective of age or gender. In particular, for infants, elders, or people with weak cardiopulmonary function and immunity, a respiratory infection may cause aftereffects, leading to death. Diseases associated with respiratory virus mostly start with cold symptoms and may cause other various symptoms such as pharyngitis, worsening of chronic asthma, and pneumonia. Early diagnosis of viral respiratory infection can prevent drug abuse of unnecessary antibiotics and identify a type of virus early, thereby allowing providing a suitable treatment to the patients.
Methods for detecting the respiratory virus include conventional culture, rapid cell culture, rapid antigen non-immunofluorescence tests, rapid antigen immunofluorescence based tests, and molecular methods that use electrophoresis. The cell culture, which is a standard test method, takes more than 5 to 9 days to get the test results, and thus it has limitations to be used for early diagnosis and treatment of viral respiratory infection. To resolve these limitations, a R-Mix viral culture, which gives the test results within 24 to 72 hours and has similar sensitivity to conventional culture, has been used, but this also has a limitation to be used for early diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Also, rapid antigen non-immunofluorescence test can give the test results fast, but has a disadvantage of yielding high false negative results, as it is less sensitive than the conventional culture. As for molecular methods that use electrophoresis, it has a good sensitivity, but has a risk of contamination since it is conducted in two steps, and also takes long time to perform.
With this background, in effort to develop a method for resolving the limitations of the detection method for respiratory virus, including low sensitivity, risk of contamination, and long performing time, the present inventors have developed the primer sets and probes that can amplify the genes that are specific to 14 types of viruses, and confirmed that when each of the primer set and probe is used, the 14 types of respiratory viruses can be diagnosed simultaneously with high sensitivity and specificity, thereby completing the present invention.